Forthcoming new website

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Added 06 April 2015, 10:00 PM

New version, new brand – so, new website. Here's a sneak-peek of our new Composr CMS home page:

The new site is far better organised. We've taken lessons from 10 years of ocportal.com to better convey what Composr CMS is and does. We've designed 18 pages of the site at the Photoshop level, and have a separate mobile design (we've not yet decided whether this will be at launch or not, as this isn't implemented yet).

We will be launching Composr over on a new URL. After launch we expect to leave ocportal.com mostly as is, supporting the ocPortal versions (versions v9 and earlier).

Through the v10 development process we have been maintaining ocPortal versions 8 and 9. We chose to maintain 8 due to the big 'theme break' we had with v9 - even we didn't want to upgrade, given we expected to release a totally new site for v10. Once v10 is out we probably will stop supporting v8, but will continue to support important fixes for v9 for some time.

This was the fourth of five weekly news posts discussing the future of ocPortal. The next post will talk about our new mobile toolkit.

Composr CMS has been in development ever since ocPortal v9 has come out. We've been somewhat secretive of the overall re-launch because we knew it would take a lot of time and didn't want to get ahead of ourselves. We aren't giving a release date yet because product releases aren't a source of income, so the investment is sustained through our private client work, and done between projects. Never-the-less, it is a huge priority for us so we are getting this information out now, and pushing forward for a release ASAP.

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composr responsive designs?

Just found ocp and have been reading a lot of good things. Then I happened on the news of imminent release of Composr. Congrats. OK, so here is the question - I see no mention that Composr will support responsive site design. Everything our little company is asked to do now is responsive for large to small devices. I read that when the new site arrives that no decision has been made about the mobile version, which seems to say, no we don't have a responsive website approach. Would this be a correct assumption? I hope I am wrong. All the best with the Composr launch. And, oh - how about getting themeforest.net to come up with at least one visually pleasing template? Cheers….

ocPortal supports responsive design if you make a theme that uses media queries. It's really nothing to do with the CMS, it's to do with your CSS. If you don't like mobile mode you can turn it off, then code whatever media rules you want.

It is a decision that should be made with an engineering mindset, not a marketing mindset. Using responsive design leads to much higher bandwidth requirements over cellular connections and means you need to have the exact same page and site structure for every device – whether that is or is not appropriate really depends on the nature of the website.

Two corrections:

We haven't said Composr v10 is imminent, we've just announced the details of it so that people are kept up to speed as it's been taking a long time. I've said I really don't want people putting off their sites until it comes out.

We haven't intended to say we might not do a mobile version, we've said we may not launch with the mobile version (i.e. it may be a bit delayed). This has nothing to do with the product though, only our own website.

In the past I've tried to get theme sites to do some themes, but they never got back to me. Maybe you can try and persuade them.

ocPortal supports responsive design if you make a theme that uses media queries. It's really nothing to do with the CMS, it's to do with your CSS. If you don't like mobile mode you can turn it off, then code whatever media rules you want.

It is a decision that should be made with an engineering mindset, not a marketing mindset. Using responsive design leads to much higher bandwidth requirements over cellular connections and means you need to have the exact same page and site structure for every device - whether that is or is not appropriate really depends on the nature of the website.

I'm afraid through these announcements little core development progress was made. It's hard to get traction with so many projects are going on in the background. We are now actively pushing back new projects until after v10 though, so before too long the situation will be different.

Ongoing work is being done on tutorial improvement and part of what is in the next announcement.

Yes, I think Chris has mentioned before that he writes the tutorials from a developer perspective, which is understandable for obvious reasons. Though perhaps not so understandable to people who haven't got developer brains (like me). I think the current tutorials are helpful in highlighting possibilites, but without detailed explainations and useful example code there is still a void of understanding that is hard to fathom. I know the current version of ocPortal has massive potential I haven't really taken advantage of because I simply don't know enough to believe I am changing the right things in the right places. So I too hope Composr Tutorials are at least a bit more in-depth. Let's also hope more people who do know how to do useful things are willing to share them.